Your marketing team’s success relies on your ability to drive sales with your website. You need to generate more leads to create sales opportunities and maintain a steady flow of revenue.

Content marketing provides a solution for the entire sales funnel. Blogs that are interesting to read and valuable to searchers give websites more opportunities to rank for core keywords, educate prospects and nurture their interest until they’re ready to buy – or at least take you up on an offer for a free trial or product demo.

When a content strategy focuses on relevance and providing information to your target audience, you can see results like one of our clients in the B2B tech software space:

Web sales increased 91 percent

Average order value improved 10 percent

Search results for a competitive search term outranked a competitor

This company offers computer training classes and certifications to help professionals advance their careers, and its marketing team recognized that educational content was a prime opportunity to speak to its target audience.

The best SEO strategy addresses your customers’ Qs

Ambitious students and professionals know computer program skills are in demand, and want to know which certifications will give them the most benefits. Corporations looking to educate their teams want to know which training sessions will help them increase productivity and efficiency.

The blog content provides answers to the questions these readers are asking, like: “What new programs should my employees use to be more efficient at x task?” and “What skills help x job candidates be more competitive?”

A rising search presence lifts conversion results

Over time, this question and answer approach has established the company as a valuable source of information that people want, and the company’s search results reflect its ability to speak to its target audience.

Because the company’s content strategy was specifically designed for prospective customers, it was bringing in a qualified audience that wasn’t just clicking links and bouncing immediately. People were coming to the site and converting – making bigger purchases over time:

Comparing results quarter over quarter, the average order value increased 10 percent.

Overall web transactions nearly doubled, rising 91 percent.

Part of this uptick is the result of smart promotion, but it’s also supported by the brand’s growing search presence. Conversions from organic traffic also improved, growing 26 percent.

During the same time frame, the company’s search presence saw noticeable gains and even overtook a competitor. With a bigger footprint in the B2B tech software space, the brand was capturing its prospects’ attention through interesting pieces of content. To see how our client stacks up in search against other companies in its industry, we used an SEO platform called Search Metrics.

If you’re already creating content for your target audience, you need to know how it compares with the companies you’re going up against for keyword visibility.

If you’re already creating content for your target audience, you need to know how it compares with the companies you’re going up against for keyword visibility. SEO tools will show you where you’re taking the lead, or where you’re falling behind and may need to refocus your strategy for quick and long-term wins.

Once readers clicked through to the site, they were directed to product landing pages where they could learn about the company’s solutions. And ultimately, the product offerings were winning them over to generate sales.

We can track Goal completions and ecommerce conversions in Google Analytics to determine how content strategies are impacting sales over time. If you don’t have these yet, you need to set them up or you’ll be shooting in the dark.

Create content to generate demand and drive conversions

If you need to achieve similar results on your marketing team, you should take a step back and look at the content that’s on your site.

Does it do a good job of answering prospects’ questions?

Is there enough of it to give readers a reason to come back?

Is it optimized for search?

Are you publishing on a consistent basis to be competitive?

Is it optimized for sales with an internal linking strategy to your landing pages?

You need to start creating content that checks all of these boxes NOW, with the understanding that it takes time to catch on and provide the kinds of results our client saw.

If you’re in the same (rising) boat as our client and you’re already at the point where you’re seeing search AND revenue gains, you should be looking for opportunities to generate even better results. We’d like to see this company produce more content that promotes its best selling products as a way to capitalize on growing interest and organic search momentum, as well as adding custom CTAs to the blog pages to create even more opportunities for sales. (We’ve seen that CTA improvements can increase conversion rates 300 percent with our other clients.)

A winning content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated to convert leads into customers. It needs to be engaging and it needs to offer innate value. When you strike these three chords with your website visitors, you’re already setting up the shot for better sales and stronger marketing results.

For more information about building results-driven content marketing strategies, download these eBooks from our free resource center:

Lauren Kaye

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.